The Stopwatch project is an inexpensive bench Stopwatch/Timer, hardware/firmware solution
that I have had on my long list of projects to do for some time. It has a simple interface; a
20x4 LCD display times and 4x4 keypad to configure the times. There are two main segments
in the Stopwatch project; the clock source, an ATtiny2313 MCU that provides the clock pulses to the
the Stopwatch segment, an ATMega328P that provides everything else.

In this the second and final article of the Garage Light series I will be providing the
receiver and associated circuitry and code to complete the project. When I started this
project I didn't have a clear design and as a result got into a just one more feature
mode and ended up with a nice design.

As the old saying goes, "Necessity is the mother of invention" and in this case the need was a light in the garage that could be turned on for a period of time when motion is detected. We tried putting a couple of inexpensive motion sensitive, battery operated lights along the path to the recycle and garbage bins but they are so faint and you have to get so close to trigger them that it just didn't do the job.

You've got your finger on the mouse button ready to pull the trigger and finally order that
Raspberry Pi 2 that just came out but you don't know if you've got the time to do the
research to learn how to set it up and start programming it. In this first of n
part series of articles I will walk you through the process of getting the Pi configured.
In future articles we will configure the Pi to program in the C/C++ and Python languages.

In this, the second article in an ongoing series dedicated to the amazing Raspberry Pi
we will be configuring the Pi as an MQTT message broker using Mosquitto. Mosquitto is a
lightweight, but powerful publish/subscribe model messaging system that can be installed on a
wide variety of platforms. Our goal in this tutorial is to install, configure and test the
software on a Raspberry Pi 2 and to be able to publish and subscribe to messages on not
only the Pi but other computers as well.

In this, the third in the Raspberry Pi series of articles we will be building on previous
articles to develop a simple solution for what I would call an Internet of Things Hello World
project. In my previous articles we discussed initially setting up the Raspberry Pi and in the second article
using Mosquitto as a message broker. In this article we will be introducing several new
software, middleware and firmware packages as well as a new hardware device the ESP8266-12e
WiFi adapter. If you haven't read my previous articles I suggest you read them before continuing.

There are many ways to drive small current motors, those requiring 500mA or less
but the L293H Quadruple Half-H driver is a versatile chip that was designed for
use with motors, can very easily be controlled with a micro-controller and can be
purchased
JameCo Electronics. Using this chip we can drive either 2 DC motors or one Stepper motor
and we will learn how to do both in this tutorial. The components needed to complete
this exercise are an ATMega328p Micro-controller to interface with and control the
L293D device but any controller may be used, the L293D component and one dc motor
and/or one stepper motor.

In order to learn the assembler programming language some knowledge must be known
about the hardware we are using. In this tutorial we will start with a brief introduction
to the inner workings of the AVR micro controller then move on to pure assembler
and finally show how to mix 'C' and assembler languages.

While doing the research for this article
I found that there is quite a bit of information on the net regarding this
subject but one has to go to various places to get the whole picture so
in this article I am attempting to gather all that information and offer it
in one place, here! All examples are compiled using Atmel Studio 6.0 SP2
and the ATMega1280, but with a little customization can be modified to work
with any Atmel Microcontroller.